SFist Karen catches some Andy Goldsworthy-esque art on the beach. Meet the Ritual Roasters, the folks behind local politics website Usual Suspects, the guy who produced The Devil and Daniel Johnston, and some hot sexcake talk! Plus: we shamelessly speculate about the "CIA agent" posting notices around town. In sports: Giants (plus the new Barry show), A's, mountain biking, and the end of the women's NCAA tourney. We wish a fond farewell to abecedarian eater......

SFist Sam was kind enough to take a picture for WRTW for us -- isn't it gorgeous? Thanks, SFist Sam! Last week's winner, the SF Weekly: Tributes to the dearly departed PUNI, including a hilarious letter from the NextBus people that we know SFist MattyMatt will enjoy. New section called "Sucka Free City," with a profile of Killing My Lobster. Where will illegal indoor smokers go now that Sherlock's Haven is closing? Cover: land use......

The food blog world is aflutter over the biggest awards ceremony of the year. The Oscars? Don't be silly. It's all about the food, baby. The 2006 Independent Food Festival and Awards are open source awards, only with taste buds, not coding. And just as Firefox kicks Redmond's butt, the winners of these awards are worth seeking out. Some are national, some are local, all are good. Those golden statues barely got a mention in the food-o-sphere. Seemingly only Bruce Cole, editor of Edible San Francisco, deemed them worthy of talk and then only as a way to explain why you're better off cooking red meat than watching the red carpet. His technique sounds good, but would some pictures kill him? As long as we're in meatlandia, let's just go all out: Bacon for dinner! More meat (goat and crab), SFist Sam, and liquid nitrogen ice cream, after the jump. SFist Jacob, contributing...

SFist Sam had a sandwich by our famous Golden Gate Bridge as she closes off the 23rd letter of her ongoing dine-around-the-alphabet series, while SFist Ced also stops by the Ws with a trip to Winterland. In SFist Family news, let's all raise our grande-sized paper latte cups wrapped in little cardboard sleeves in honor of SFist Jeremy and his new son! (And then let's run in fear from SFist Jeremy's wrath that we're going to a coffee place where they call medium-sized drinks "grandes"!) That makes two SFist babies in one month! Moving from babies to pets -- SFist Franny's going to do her doggie best to power San Francisco, and .... would you look at that adorable fat cat? The Tour of California huffs and puffs its way up Telegraph Hill, while down the street in North Beach, Mayor Gavin Newsom huffs and puffs his way through two dates over a whirlwind weekend. Barry Bonds'll be huffing and puffing his way through training camp -- that is, until he drops out again. And we move ever closer to getting citywide wireless internet access, which'll make it that much easier to steal elections in the future. Picture by SFist Sam...

You had a dose of Dosa last week, and we so agree with what SFist Sam wrote that we should leave it to rest. Especially since Dosa probably won't need us to give it word of mouth to succeed: it reminded us of Ti Couz for wrapping fillings into thin pancakes, dosas and crepes being vague cousins; and it reminded us of the Mission's Osha Thai for the dating couple clientele, the energy, the......

A short PSA: yesterday we (aka. SFist Sam) investigated the food of Provence. Since no one has done more for the PR of the Provence area than Peter Mayle --except maybe for those guys Cezanne and Van Gogh-- we have to mention he will be signing his new book, Confessions of a French Baker, Saturday at noon at the Ferry Building's Sur La Table. The French baker is the one prominently featured in A Year in Provence, of course. He also will be at a ticketed event tonight at the Clay, tomorrow in Danville, and Saturday at 6pm in Sebastopol (cf. info at the very bottom of this post). As it is about food in France, we will review the book, hopefully next week, as we only received it today. Last week, we started our epic "battle thai," with a lackluster visit to Osha Thai. We usually give at least two visits to a restaurant, but we were not particularly in the mood to go back there. We instead opted to visit Marnee Thai. We had checked out Thai Chef, a block away from the original Marnee, and at the time really felt we should see how the reference in the neighborhood fares against the new young guns....

In an era of nuclear families, divorce is not the trauma it used to be. Consider the little Emmy's parents, for instance. She is doing fine, as we (ie. SFist Sam) can attest, despite the founders having gone each their way. As we understand it, she stayed in the custody of her mom, while daddy started afresh, and partnered Blue Jay cafe. Blue Jay is a little brother to Emmy's in many ways: It......

Two food blogs, Life begins at 30 and Locavores have been organizing the Eat Local Challenge, an effort to support local producers and encourage awareness of what is on our plates, by eating for the whole month of August, food grown within some radius of where you live. We find it a noble goal. However, our participation could be summarized in our nodding with approval, maybe saying ‘you go, guys’, then eating Dungeness crab......

Live food was all the rage two years ago. Everybody was oooh and aaah-ing at Roxanne, a haute cuisine place which did not cook its food. Everybody who could afford it, as the place was totally unaffordable and quite exclusive. For the rest of us, we would go to the Urban Forage for some gooey yummy raw-eos, some happy vegan cookies who never feared the oven. We are not here to ironize about these......

Special "Foodie Roundup" edition. Remember when we told you KQED was inviting people to apply for a new restaurant review show, "Check Please, Bay Area" with a panel of bloggers? Now they've put up the actual application page, so if you want to talk about food on TV, here's your chance. In another update, Bay Blogger alum Jen over at Life Begins at Thirty teamed up with Locavores (a neologism that we kind of......

In which SFist eats its way around the Bay area in alphabetical order. Last week, SFist and its international possy of culinary investigators headed off to Clement Street in search of somewhere to eat beginning with the letter B. Intrigued by the promise of food from a country neither of the three Brits, the Texan Princess or Le Monsieur F had ever visited nor were likely to visit any time in the near future,......